Lead Story:  Atlanta's Arts Comprehensive Report

 

In 2006, Bailey traced his family’s ancestral links to the Mende people of Sierra Leone. This inspired him to create his, most intimate work to date―a miniature drawing done in ink and coffee on a piece of sheet music that features a Mende mask framed within a tiny red-velvet-lined, 19th-century tintype case, evoking an heirloom family portrait. This piece will be on view in the exhibition alongside more recent works, including a new sculpture indebted to the materiality and smooth, curvilinear forms of Mende masks, but not their functionality. Repeatedly rubbed with finishing wax in a daily studio ritual, Bailey created a Brancusi-esque objet d’art—an inscrutable prop for a Neo-Dada-style, contemporary art world performance.

Other works explore issues of scale. A number of pieces will highlight the artist’s penchant to animate his work with large-scale photographic reproductions of black-and-white prints given to him by his grandmother as well as historic photos he collects, in order to place African Americans at the center of both American and world history. Another new work, “Clean-up II,” is a painted wooden sculpture in the form of a 10-foot-high baseball bat. Bailey comments, “The reason why I made the bat so big was to beat down all the things that I confront. Baseball being one of my first passions, before art, the bat was like my paintbrush. In baseball, the fourth batter that comes up is the clean-up hitter.”

The exhibition will also feature seven sets of “medicine cabinet sculptures,” whose contents include a broad range of culturally charged objects, imagery and raw materials, from indigo powder to tobacco leaves to Georgia red clay. The contents of the cabinets are displayed in deeply recessed shelves protected under reflective, tinted glass, a nod to Kongo minkisi sculptures from central Africa, which contain healing and protective medicine within mirrored packets. These sculptures link the too often disconnected histories of peoples of Africa and the African Diaspora and emphasize collective experiences.

“Radcliffe Bailey’s art is consistently informed by a strong social and historical consciousness, and solidly grounded in family and community. The exhibition combines a rich, narrative content with a high-level of abstraction and poetic resonance to explore questions of history and memory,” said Carole Thompson, the High’s Fred and Rita Richman Curator of African Art and curator of the exhibition. “Bailey’s art traces the complex network of his ‘aesthetic DNA’ to create an antidote to cultural and historical amnesia.”

Exhibition Organization and Support
"Radcliffe Bailey: Memory as Medicine" will be on view at the High Museum of Art from June 26 to September 11, 2011, and is curated by Carol Thompson, the High's Fred and Rita Richman Curator of African Art, in consultation with Michael Rooks, the High's Wieland Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art. The exhibition is made possible by the National Endowment for the Arts as part of "American Masterpieces: Three Centuries of Artistic Genius." Additional support is provided by the Lubo Fund, Jack Shainman Gallery, Vicki and John Palmer and members of the Radcliffe Bailey Guild. A full-color catalogue will accompany "Memory as Medicine," and will feature essays by Carol Thompson, Michael Rooks and additional authors.

Catalogue
A full-color, nearly two-hundred page book will accompany "Memory as Medicine," and will feature essays by Carol Thompson, Michael Rooks, René Paul Barilleaux, Manthia Diawara, and Ed Spriggs.

High Museum of Art
The High Museum of Art, founded in 1905 as the Atlanta Art Association, is the leading art museum in the southeastern United States. With more than 12,000 works of art in its permanent collection, the High Museum of Art has an extensive anthology of 19th- and 20th-century American and decorative art; significant holdings of European paintings; a growing collection of African American art; and burgeoning collections of modern and contemporary art, photography and African art. The High is also dedicated to supporting and collecting works by Southern artists and is distinguished as the only major museum in North America to have a curatorial department specifically devoted to the field of folk and self-taught art. The High¡¯s media arts department produces acclaimed annual film series and festivals of foreign, independent and classic cinema. In November 2005 the High opened three new buildings by architect Renzo Piano that more than doubled the Museum¡¯s size, creating a vibrant ¡°village for the arts¡± at the Woodruff Arts Center in midtown Atlanta. For more information about the High, visit www.High.org.

The Woodruff Arts Center
The Woodruff Arts Center is ranked among the top four arts centers in the nation. The Woodruff is unique in that it combines four visual and performing arts divisions on one campus as one not-for-profit organization. Opened in 1968, the Woodruff Arts Center is home to the Alliance Theatre, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, the High Museum of Art and Young Audiences. To learn more about the Woodruff Arts Center, please visit www.woodruffcenter.org.